In today’s digital world, teachers should be best and brightest

Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.

It will come as no surprise to anybody who has been paying attention that kids in today’s classrooms with their BlackBerrys, iTouches, iPhones, thousands of apps, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and laptop windows on the world are making a new kind of demand on public education and its teachers.

“Digital” has always been in these kids’ cultural DNA, they’ve likely never written in cursive, their cellphones tell them the time and are their social lifelines, they can organize a flash mob in two minutes and anything bizarre that happens in a classroom will be on YouTube later that same evening.

Teaching this group in a classroom is not getting any easier.

Today’s kids are awash in a computerized technology that does not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their teachers to help them distinguish gold from dross.

This raises the question about how the next cohort of teachers are being prepared to meet this challenge, which makes a recent Simon Fraser University report all the more interesting.

Authored by The Task Force on Teacher Education for the 21st Century (TEF21), the SFU report is directed at creating an updated vision of teacher education in British Columbia.

The challenge for planners and policy-makers, say the authors, is to move their thinking beyond immediate issues and current realities; anticipate change and look around the corner.

The report cannot be easily summarized but suggests teacher education, along with the job itself, need to become more sophisticated and more demanding.

While TEF21 is cautious in its predictions, it identifies some education trends, which include the following:

Achievement levels need to increase because students need more sophisticated understandings and skills in order to deal successfully with citizenship and employment.

Technology use is increasing at all grade levels, in school and at home.

Not only can technology enhance current pedagogy, it can also create new possibilities for learning — technology use may change teachers’ work and the structure of school.

According to the Conference Board of Canada, skills are going to be needed through a project-based curriculum, which is interdisciplinary, integrated and will include economic survival skills such as those advocated by Tony Wagner in his widely read book, The Global Achievement Gap.

Such a curriculum is the vehicle for the next generation of teachers to help kids develop critical thinking and problem solving, agility and adaptability, initiative and entrepreneurialism, effective oral and written communication and curiosity and imagination.

All of which makes teaching an increasingly challenging job. Here in B.C., it is getting tougher for teacher training institutions to attract the best of the best, as neither jobs nor money await successful graduation.

On the average, a teacher graduate with a master’s degree, which requires a minimum five to six years of university education, can expect to start at around $47, 700. After 12 years of service at current rates, that teacher will be earning about $71,000.

Canada’s RCMP is also recruiting. Entrance requirements include a Canadian secondary school diploma or equivalent, a valid, unrestricted Canadian driver’s licence and that candidates be at least 19.

The training program consists of 785 hours and an entry-level constable can expect a salary of $49,680, rising to $80,498 after 36 months of service.

If the SFU report is correct in predicting that teacher training must become more demanding in order to keep up with the expectations and learning styles of today’s kids, teacher advocates may have a point in suggesting that in order to attract the best and brightest (Finland, where kids routinely top international assessments, attracts the top 10 per cent of university grads into teaching), some rethinking is overdue about the value our culture and society places on the education of our kids and its expectations of our teachers.

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